At the ISC High Performance Conference 2022 we are establishing the so called Sofa Talks at our joint booth of JARA-CSD and NHR4CES (booth number J905). The aim is to discuss topics of interest to the community in a rather untypical, quiet and small setting.
Tim Gerrits, member of the CSG Visualization in NHR4CES, will kick things off on Monday, May 30 at 4:30 pm with the topic Visualization in HPC – Keeping up with the pace. While hardware and algorithms for HPC simulations keep improving, this introduces challenges. Complex as well as massive data becomes increasingly difficult to analyze. However, as humans are incredibly well trained in using their visual sense, visualization is a powerful way to overcome some of the problems. In this Sofa Talk, we want to assess the most pressing questions in providing visualization solutions, talk about exciting new developments for visualization approaches and broaden the network of visualization researchers. Guests on our sofa will be Francois Mazen (Assistent Director for Scientific Visualization at Kitware Europe), Uwe Wössner (HPC Center Stuttgart (HLRS)) und Jens Henrik Göbbert (Forschungszentrum Jülich).
Sandra Wienke, member of CSG Parallelism and Performance in NHR4CES and the HPC group at RWTH Aachen University, welcomes guests on Tuesday, May 31 at 11.00 am with the topic TCO Evaluation of Benchmarks for HPC Procurements – University job mix and SPEC HPG benchmark suites as business cases. While HPL and Stream benchmarks have a long tradition in HPC cluster procurements and acceptance tests, they do not reflect the real-world usage of an HPC cluster that often runs multi-node memory-bound jobs. To evaluate the real value of an HPC system, relevant and real-world applications should be included in the request for proposals (RP). Here, university job mixes and/or SPEC HPG benchmark suites can serve as business cases. Furthermore, total costs of ownership (TCO) comprising, e.g., running time of the applications, their energy consumption and cooling costs, play an important role in making informed decisions in procurements. For this sofa talk, we invite interested attendees to discuss possibilities and challenges of such a benchmarking and TCO approach, to share their own experiences and to foster further steps with respect to benchmarking and TCO in general.
In the afternoon (Tuesday, May 31 at 2:00 pm) Tim Cramer, member of the HPC group at RWTH Aachen University, will continue with the topic JARDS4NHR: Online Application for HPC resources. Since 2021 selected Tier-2 HPC Centers in Germany are restructured in a national HPC alliance (NHR) in order to join forces for a common offer for researchers. For HPC user convenience, a common infrastructure for the application, approval and allocation process based on the online system JARDS (developed by Jülich Supercomputing Centre) is currently build up. In this Sofa Talk, we invite interested attendees to learn more about the current status and discuss open questions.
Joachim Protze and Christian Terboven from the CSG Parallelism and Performance and the HPC group at RWTH Aachen University will host our last Sofa Talk on this year’s ISC: Contributions to OpenMP 6.0. Experts from the OpenMP Language Committee talk about ongoing affinity and tool support efforts. OpenMP 4 introduced first affinity concepts and OpenMP 5 introduced tool interfaces. In this sofa talk we will discuss ongoing efforts to improve OpenMP in these two aspects. Construction sites for both topics are tasking and target support. This talk will be held on Wednesday, June 01, at 9:15 am.
